What, however, especially distinguishes Tasso, not only from Milton, but from modern epic poets in general, is the number and excellence of his characters, mostly of his own creation. Rinaldo, Tancred, Argante, Emireno, Solimano, Clorinda, Armida, Erminia, form a gallery of portraits whose picturesqueness and variety redeem Tasso’s inferiority in other respects; while at the same time, even were his canvas less brilliantly occupied, it could not be said that his poem wanted either the unity, the interest, the dignity, the just proportion, the poetical spirit, the elevated diction, or the harmonious versification essential to a great epic. The great defect of the poem, regarded as an epic, is that Tasso’s bent, like Virgil’s, was rather towards the pathetic, the picturesque, and the romantic, than towards the sublime and majestic. He can command dignity and grandeur on occasion; but, even as the _Æneid_ opens most readily at Dido, Marcellus, or Euryalus, so the _Jerusalem_ attracts most by its female characters, Erminia, Clorinda, and Armida. Armida is a charming personage, an improvement upon the Alcina of Ariosto, but a passage like the following, rendered by Miss Ellen Clerke, would be more appropriately placed in an _Orlando_ or an _Odyssey_ than in an epic on so high and grave a theme as the redemption of the holy city from the unbeliever: _Arrived on shore, he in review doth pass The spot with eager glance, but nought descries, Save caves and water-flowers, and trees and grass, So deems himself befooled; but in such wise The place doth tempt--such charms did nature mass Together there--that on the sward he lies, His forehead from its heavy armour eases, And bares it to the sweet and soothing breezes._ _Then of a gurgling murmur he was 'ware Within the stream, and thither turned his eyes, And saw a ripple in 'mid current there Whirl round about itself in eddying guise, And thence emerge a glint of golden hair, And thence a maiden’s lovely face uprise; Her voice the ear enthralled, her face the vision, And heaven hung tranced upon her notes Elysian._ _And now the false one’s song of treacherous wile O’erpowers the youth with slumberous heaviness, And by degrees that serpent base and vile Subdues his senses with o’ermastering stress, Nor death’s still mimicry, wrought by her guile, Could thunders rouse from; other sounds far less. Then the foul sorceress from her ambush showing, Stands over him, with hate and fury glowing._